DeeVee

I think you hit on what bothered me about "Harlan Billy." It isn't that it was inauthentic, it just doesn't FLOW. I think Long did it to tie Billy to his father as the first and preferred son. So, on that level, I can understand the choice. Luckily, the full name was not used very often. As I said, I've always been interested in nomenclature. I think I can come up with a possible way she came up with the name. Back during the Middle Ages, there were very, very few first names. You had a lot of Thomases, Richards, Henrys, Marys, Anns, Margarets, Elizabeths, etc. So they would have to come up with variations of the names to differentiate people. Shortening/elongating the name and/or replacing vowels and/or consenants were some ways to do it. So you'd have Tom/Tam, Richard/Rich/Rick/Dick, Henry/Hank/Hal, Mary/Mare/Mae, Ann/Nan/Nancy, Margaret/Marge/Maggie/Meg/Peg, Elizabeth/Eliza/Lizzie/Beth/Bess/Bette/Betty, etc. Most of these names survive to today. Certain variations go in and out of fashion. Sometimes people even come up with new variations. For Reva, I can see the evolution being Rebecca/Reba/Reva. I think it was deliberate, too. The fact that Phillip gave Beth his mother's wedding gown to wear at a party (I think it was the one where Phillip's paternity was revealed) would seem to support that.

Since we're talking about the Lewis clan and we have people on here that hail from their area of the country, I have a question about something that's always bugged me a little bit: Now I know that in the South and possibly in the more Western states, there are some interesting naming styles and conventions. All the Lewises except for Mindy were named by Marland. Who, oddly, seemed to love double-naming his characters, like Kelly Louise, Alan Michael, Lesley Anne, etc. I say oddly because he wasn't from the South, where this kind of naming tradition is popular. He definitely named HB, BUT...it wasn't until Long came on that it was revealed that stood for "Harlan Billy" and that Billy was "Harlan Billy" also. (Or was it Harland, and Reva was dropping the "d?" Maybe someone else knows). So my question is: would anyone in the state of Oklahoma realistically be named Harlan (or Harland) Billy? It sounds like a name more fitting for someone from Appalachia. You know, like Jim Bob on the Waltons. Is even "Melinda Sue" a name you might find in Oklahoma? In the case of the Shaynes, their names seem more region-appropriate. Hawke and Rusty are like cowboy names, Reva, Sarah--you can imaging pioneer women with those names. Roxy sounds like a dance-hall girl, which is actually perfect for her character. I'm very interested in nomenclature, so I'd really love to know how appropriate these names were for these characters.

I think they can get a little bit of a break on that score because this was the 1980s. Everyone acted like they were rich on soaps. Someone like Bea Reardon wouldn't have been a regular at the country club IRL, even if her daughter did marry up. But on a soap, yeah.

It's funny, because almost everything you described could fit the Buchanans on OLTL (although they were from Texas, not Oklahoma). Even though they also were an obvious bid to cash in on the popularity of Dallas, they did take more care in creating them. Though they didn't have a character that exactly matched how Reva fit on the GL canvas, when he was young Clint had a "forbidden" romance with a Latina lady of obvious indigenous ancestry. Their romance resulted in the birth of their son Cord, who became a very popular character. So, yeah, definitely some missed opportunities for more authentic storytelling.

What's hilarious about the Lewis family is everyone sounds like they come from somewhere different. HB sounds like he's in a Hollywood cowboy movie from the 1940s, Billy sounds like he's from the Deep South, Trish has a very subtle Southern accent, and Josh sounds like he grew up in California. When Reva was introduced KZ gave her a really thick, almost comical accent. Like a female Foghorn Leghorn. Thankfully, she modified it a great deal over the years.

My problem exactly with Vera. TBF, Long tended to write ALL servants as insanely loyal to the detriment of their own lives. Jane (played by the wonderful Mary Pat Gleason) was Vera's white counterpart. I think she started out as a physical therapist but then stayed on as Amanda’s maid. She even volunteered to sew a costume at the last minute so Amanda could attend Quint and Nola's Civil War themed engagement party. Practically the Fairy Godmother. 😁 The most extreme example, though, was Elise, Alan's rent-a-whore, who cosplayed in her slutty maid costume but was also his devoted servant. I haven't been able to find the episode, but I SWEAR there was a scene after Alan Michael first came back to town where he was waiting for Alan to come home. He found Elise sitting in a chair like the lady of the house reading some magazine like Vogue. He says to her, "You really like your job, don't you?" The way he said the line was so good. Carl was definitely my favorite Alan Michael. 😂

Thirty. I think I read somewhere that Dr. Sedgwick holds the record for longest non-contract role on a soap played by the same actor. Couldn't confirm that, but seems about right.

Larry Wyatt. I liked that he was the cop who was always around during crime storylines. I forget the actor's name, but I liked him a lot. I kind of hated how GL ended up practically overrun with cops and detectives as regular characters later on. If I want to watch a cop show, I'll watch one on prime time. Even Edge of Night didn't have that many cops.

We dropped Paramount+ and don't have cable, so I'm stuck a week behind on Pluto TV. I'm sure it's been said already, but I've been so impressed by the young man playing Donnell, who is doing a phenomenal job after being thrown into such a big, emotional storyline. Which makes some of the other casting of young people on the show such a head scratcher. It's like half of them are rising stars, and the other half are dead weight. I just don't get why they are clinging to certain people. I do think the show has been improving over the past few weeks. My biggest gripe (other than the casting issue) has been story threads that seemed to be totally dropped, even forgotten. But looks like they're starting to deal with some of these things now.

Bill Bell did that on Y&R a lot too. They would have social issue stories that were basically a PSA. That definitely deserves criticism. However... Most "social issue" stories like the ones Marland and Bell did were pretty much entities on to themselves. What I mean is, they occupied a very small corner of the canvas. Often, characters would be introduced just for that purpose and shown the door once the point of the social issue story was made. Bell, for instance, would do a teen a pregnancy story and introduce a young girl for that purpose. There was one that in the early days of the show Chris was involved with. I think the girl was a runaway or something. Chris helped the girl and convinced her that putting up the baby for adoption was her best option. The girl gave birth, gave the kid up, then walked out of the hospital and off the show. The end. Whereas Bridget was a member of a core family and her pregnancy and her child would impact many characters. The Roger/Holly rape story definitely was meant to be instructive. Laws making marital rape a crime were fairly new at the time. But instead of just making it about Roger and Holly, that story impacted almost everyone on the canvas. It generated story for years, even after Roger and Holly were written out of the show. And it continued after Roger and Holly returned a decade later. To me, those are the best kinds of stories.

I believe they had intention of educating with the marital rape storyline. Oh, and maybe Rita's sexual dysfunction story? Way, way back in the show's history, they did a story about Bert having uterine cancer. Which I think caused quite a stir at the time and inspired more women to get screened. That's pretty much all I can come up with.

Floyd is pretty much the only character created by the Dobsons that Marland improved. The cynic in me wants to say it was because he was needed for his Kelly/Nola story. There were a few hints dropped that Katie and Floyd came from a harsh, even abusive background. They definitely could have done more with that. Denise Pence (Katie) has a YT channel with some candid videos about her GL tenure. She clearly is still a tad bitter about her dismissal from the show. Oh, yes, I agree with that. In that case they had a deaf actress playing a deaf character who actually went through with getting a cochlear implant. (Which, back then, was somewhat controversial). And good for them, and for writing that into the show. But...using that as an excuse to break up Abby and Rick? Saying she didn't want to have kids because of it? I thought that was awful and didn't seem in character for Abby.

OMG, that's even worse. Kill off the inconvenient disabled kid. You're talking about the BJ storyline, right? Was she disabled? I don't think so. In that case, that story was handled with exceptional care and sensitivity. One of the best storylines they ever did. Considering how they treated MZ when he became ill, and how they refused to write his illness into the show, I suppose how they handled the Meg story shouldn't be a surprise.

Not only was that wildly un-Fletcher like, I think what always bothered me about this is they took the opportunity to write out Meg because they didn't want to deal long-term with a disabled character. I HATE when soaps do this kind of story only for the short-term. If you're going to do this kind of story, COMMIT to it. I believe Meg had Down Syndrome, correct? Well, there have been working actors with Down Syndrome as far back as the 1990s. There was that show with Patti Lupone (Life Goes On, was that the name?) that had a major character with Down Syndrome. Call the Midwife has had a character with Down Syndrome as a regular character for years. Why not show Meg growing up on the show? People with Down Syndrome go to school, they have hobbies, they work, they fall in love, they get married. So many opportunities for great stories missed because they decided to sweep her under the rug. It's not quite the same thing, but I give General Hospital major kudos for totally committing to a character living with HIV, especially since she was played by an actress who literally grew up on the show. I didn't mean to get all preachy this early in the morning, but this is the kind of thing that helped kill the show, IMO. Focusing on dumb crap like the clone instead of this character right under their noses who could have centered some truly memorable stories.

Interestingly, Marland turned Floyd into a more layered character. When he was first introduced, he was clearly meant to be little more than comic relief. He was practically the village idiot. Hillary dated him for a while, even though she liked him even less than Nola did. Maybe after the terrible experience with Roger, she was looking for his opposite and landed on Floyd. He was this very crass guy who would embarrass Hillary by being too loud and having bad manners. Marland turned him into a sweet, well-intentioned guy with a romantic heart. Still not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but a salt of the earth type. That's what he was like until someone got the idea to turn him into a murdering psycho.

One of the ugly things about Tony was his backstory of bullying Derek because he was smart. Which seems even worse after his very intelligent and educated siblings Mo and Jim were introduced. And he married a college professor! (But then there's Sean, the used car salesman sibling whose fashion sense never progressed beyond the mid-1970s). I think Marland was trying too hard to make him read "working class" hero by heaping a lot of cliches on him.

I was shocked when I heard Harley Venton, the actor who played Derek, was thisclose to getting the male lead role in the show Moonlighting before Bruce Willis was cast. And apparently, he was way more popular than TPTB realized because there was pushback when he was written out. Maybe they missed an opportunity here. Unfortunately, Derek was, you know, one of those sanctimonious male characters Marland was fond of writing. If they had made him a little more complex, and given him more of a story beyond moping after Hillary, it's possible he could have been developed into a strong male lead.

From the little I've seen of Vanessa in the 90s with "he who shall not be named," it was the same vibe in the beginning with them, wasn't it? Kind of a throwback to the way Vanessa was with Tony. At least, at first.

Nola was one of the ones they chem tested him with. I think Nola was pregnant at the time, too! I'm not a big fan of rushing romantic pairs into marriage. The minute Nola and Quint were married, all the energy went out of their pairing. (Same happened with Kelly and Morgan). So I think elongating their courtship with a story like this would have been much more interesting. They had him as the spoiler in Kelly and Morgan's marriage, but this would have been more layered, as it would have involved Vanessa and Josh not doing it just to put another notch on his bedpost.

Thanks for posting these! It's funny to me (kind of) that there is an article about him almost dying while he was flying because I remember him complaining that they wouldn't let him fly a helicopter during a location shoot. Of course they wouldn't, because of the insurance and because it would be kind of inconvenient if one of the major stars of the show was injured or killed during a shoot. I got the feeling he wanted Mike to be more of an action kind of hero--and some of his comments here seem to confirm that he was like that in his private life. Marland did write some stuff like that for him. I recall a big fight to the death on a ski tram during another location shoot. He suffered what a lot of soap actors who were stars during the 60s and 70s went through during the 80s. That kind of hero went out of fashion for a while and like others in his age group he didn't like it much. They were aging out of the romantic hero role as well. That doesn't mean there was no place for Mike on the show. I feel like they needed the character to ease into becoming the major patriarch figure. I don't think Stewart was interested in that kind of role.

The show's what. I guess that's a personal preference thing, but I never thought of him that way. I'd like to find some of his interviews, too, because I remember him constantly b!tching about one thing or another. Maybe that's just time exaggerating what I think I remember, though.

LOL, so true! Let's put it this way. Reva wasn't the first Slut of Springfield. All three of them were in contention. Josh went after everything in a skirt and Vanessa went after everything in pants. Though Ross was more likely to betray you in a business sense. Did Josh and Vanessa ever hook up? That would have been funny later. "So this is awkward. Remember that one time we hooked up at that motel?" "I have no idea what you're talking about!" 😂 The other thing about Ross is that he was the ONLY lawyer for much of the time after Mike left town. He had to switch from defense/business/prosecution attorney a few times to cover all the town's lawyering.

Not only that, but he told her he couldn't be personally involved with her anymore because she kept the truth about Amanda from him. She wasn't "honest" enough for him. FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, THE WOMAN HAD KEPT THIS SECRET FOR 20 YEARS AND WAS TRYING TO PROTECT HER KID! Sure, you can argue that she was wrong to risk prison (especially since she had another underage child) but he acted as though doing this meant she was a habitual liar. Didn't he break up with Alex because he didn't like the tricky way she drove Alan out of the country? (OH, THE IRONY). Yeah, Mike was a sanctimonious jerk.

That is something Long was VERY good at--writing stories where the past was still impacting the present.

Not that I can recall. 😂 IMO, the Dobsons were much better at writing for the "bad" girls than the "good" girls. I'm fine with the fact that he didn't like the character. Why not just kill her off? She was, at that point, not really needed on the canvas anymore. Whereas Jackie had more story to play.